Chances are, in any given day, you work on some combination of a desktop, laptop, phone, or tablet. If you've got a smaller screen with you, it may actually help your productivity to use your smaller screens for distracting tasks.

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As Wired suggests, using different devices for different purposes helps keep your attention focused on a specific spot. Having a separate tab for tasks like email, IMs, and general work can cause clutter real fast. If you have to glance down to your phone to check email, you're out of your default position, so it feels more natural to return to it. If you use your phone for distracting things like Facebook, it can help reinforce that your desktop is for working, not playing.

Now that people have several devices at work—a laptop, a phone, a tablet—they're finding their way to a similar trick, where they use each piece of hardware for a different purpose. Consider it a new way to manage all the digital demands on our attention: Instead of putting different tasks in different windows, people are starting to put them on different devices.

Your mileage may vary depending on your setup, available devices, and distraction tendencies, but it can help to avoid classifying certain devices as universally bad for productivity.